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Land was never seen as a limited resource in Singapore, but as a vast potential to be released. Land reclamation has added 25% to Singapore’s land territory during the last century and further extensions into the sea are still being planned and built. Now, thecelebrated Singapore model represents a paradigm of urban development inextricably tied to the practice of continuous transformation and reclamation of land. The sequence of sections through the island at two points in time,1924 and 2012, visualises the scale, the volume and the territorial logic of land construction.

The three-dimensional reconstruction of Singapore’s topography based on records from 1924 and 2012 describes the breath-taking transformation of the island-state’s physical form over the last century. As the coastline expanded, hills disappeared and eventually sand started to be imported from abroad, Singapore became larger but flatter and more abstract. The fabrication of land should not be seen as merely a consequence of Singapore’s development process. Rather, Singapore’s model of progress relies on territorial transformation as its fundamental precondition.